Steve Austad’s paper in Journal of Comparative Pathology (PubMed), Methusaleh’s Zoo: How Nature provides us with Clues for Extending Human Health Span, promotes the idea that “exceptionally long-lived organisms have important roles to play in our future understanding of the causal mechanisms and modulation of ageing.” Austad writes that most of what is known about the aging process is derived from experiments performed on short-lived laboratory species like Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Mus musculus. He suggests that studying long-lived species such as naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) and some bats like Myotis brandti that lives for 41 years, might offer insight into the mechanisms of the aging processes. There are many more species to discover and study. As Austad concludes: “However, with the dramatic acceleration in our genome sequencing capability, it is likely that new investigatory tools for these species of exceptional gerontological interest will be developed at an accelerating pace. The role of Methusaleh’s Zoo in ageing research is likely to blossom in the near future.”

Scientists from Université de Rennes use an usual organism for their research, the sub-Antarctic wingless fly, Anatalanta aptera. This fly is interesting because it has a long imaginal life thus offering a good model to study evolution and senescence. A study recently published in Biology Letters showed that contrary to expectation older flies recovered better after experiencing cold temperatures. According to the authors, “our results both challenge the generality of the prediction that ageing impairs rather than improves performance in thermal biology and highlight the scarcity of studies on the subject.”

The new gene discovered in mouse (Mus musculus), Rps23r1, decrease levels of toxic proteins that are linked to the formation plaques and tangles in the brains of Alzheimers disease patients. Published today in Neuron and the result of a worldwide collaboration of seven institutions, the research identifies the new gene and demonstrates how it reduces the levels of protein phosphorylation of key proteins involved in Alzheimers disease pathology. “Our studies reveal a new target/pathway for regulating AD pathologies and uncover a retrogene and its role in regulating protein kinase pathways,” write the authors in the articles abstract. Read more at Eureka Alert, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Science Daily.

Longevity and the process of aging are topics of perennial human interest as expressed by explorers like Alexander the Great and Juan Ponce de Leon searching for a river or spring to heal or reverse the process of aging or by modern scientists studying biology of aging.  Just a short walk across the MBL campus from EOL’s Biodiversity Informatics group resides the team charged with creating the Biology of Aging portal.

Read the full post here

A recent paper by Christina Dagmar Buesching and colleagues demonstrate two different endocrinological phenotypes in  wild European badgers, Meles meles. Type 1 males lower their testosterone levels after the end of the main mating season in winter, thus presumably saving energy and maintaining good body condition and low parasite loads, while type 2 continue to maintain high levels of circulating sex-steroids, staying in reproductive condition until late summer/ autumn. The researches found some evidence for the hypothesis that Type 1 males suffer higher early mortality rates and thus a lower life expectancy.

MeSH Cloud for Ursus maritimus

The LigerCat-generated MeSH cloud for polar bear shown above is just one of the over 50,000 species specific clouds now displayed at the Encyclopedia of Life. If a species has been mentioned in the abstract or title of an article indexed by Medline, LigerCat – a PubMed exploration tool – is able to create a species-specific tag cloud displaying the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that have also been attributed to those articles. These MeSH clouds can be used to explore the biomedical literature that specifically applies to the organism chosen. This collaboration between the Biology of Aging Portal and EOL helps make EOL pages more relevant to scientists studying aging.

Biomedical Terms

You can find the MeSH clouds under the Table of Contents Chapter Heading – Biomedical Terms on EOL Species Pages.

The New York Times reported yesterday that drugs that simulate the effects of calorie reduction on aging are now under clinical trials. The drugs mentioned, resveratrol (the bioactive component in grapes and red wine) and small molecule activators of sirtuin are being tested in combination by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA. The article also describes the idea of intrisic aging and the evolutionary theory of aging. At the time of this posting there were 137 comments to the article.

Caleb Finch’s (University of Southern California) review: Update on Slow Aging and Negligible Senescence – A Mini-Review, recently published in the journal Gerontology, explains the concept of negligible senescence he developed about 20 years ago. Since formulating this hypothesis he has been searching for organisms that display slow aging. In this review he discusses several long-lived species: turtles – Blanding’s turtle  (Emydoidea blandingii), painted turtle  (Chrysemys picta), the fish genus  Sebastes also called rockfish, the naked mole-rat  (Heterocephalus glaber), and human centarians (Homo sapiens).

Gregory Blomquist uses patterns of physical traits and genetic correlations to try to determine if there is a trade-off between early reproduction and survival in his recent paper in Biology Letters. By studying rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, he saw a strong positive correlation for the trade-off, indicating antagonistic pleiotropy. First formulated by George Williams, antagonistic pleiotropy says that genes that increase the chance of successful reproduction early in life have harmful effects later in life, therefore limiting lifespan.

The journal Developmental Neurobiology recently published an article linking age-related patterns of task performance in the ant, Pheidole dentata, with an increase in serotonergic cell bodies in the optic lobes of worker ants. Serotonin is modulator of insect behavior. The increase in serotonin in several neural tissues appears to be related to the type of tasks the worker performs and “the development of the visual system, enabling the detection of task-related stimuli outside the nest,” according to the authors.